Books on Buddhism, logics, and philosophy
This document is an on-line reprint of Augustine: Confessions, a text and commentary by James J. O'Donnell (Oxford: 1992; ISBN 0-19-814378-8). The text and commentary were encoded in SGML by the Stoa Consortium in co-operation with the Perseus Project; the HTML files were generated from the archival SGML version.
Each book of the text has a link to introductory commentary on that book, and each section of the text has a link to detailed comments on the section. Links within the commentary connect not only to the section of text directly being annotated, but also to other parts of the text and commentary. Footnotes in the commentary appear at the end of each book; the footnote numbers are links from the commentary text to the footnote and from the footnote text back to the commentary. Where possible, links have been provided to the texts of classical works and Biblical passages cited in the commentary. Links at the end of each book of the text and commentary allow navigation to the next book or the previous one of text, commentary, or both together.
In 1772 Ernst Platner published Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise. I want to consider how that combination of “physicians” and “philosophers” got into his title by recovering a peculiar mode of philosophical self-presentation that became crucial in Europe in the middle of the 18th century, the médecin-philosoph. I will connect the idea with the “paradigm shift” to “vital materialism” in French life science around mid-century in the works of Buffon, Maupertuis, La Mettrie and Diderot, stressing how the last two figures, in particular, took up the stance of the médecin-philosoph. I will then show how a parallel tradition took shape in Germany, culminating in Platner’s book.John H. Zammito (Rice University): Médecin-philosoph: Persona for Radical Enlightenment
Today, the word "anthropology" means either the philosophical consideration of mankind and its special position in nature or the ethnological study of early cultures. These two definitions are only partly compatible with the way that this term was used during the Enlightenment and the Romantic period.
It is no coincidence that anthropology has its roots in the Renaissance - it is a discipline which is firmly grounded in the modern era, no longer drawing on metaphysics but instead looking to the here and now of human existence, combining philosophical ambitions with physiological and psychological questions. Thus, from its beginnings on, anthropology looked at issues which today would be considered medical, psychological, or philosophical as well as anthropological in the modern sense.
This interest in the "whole man" allowed anthropology to become a fundamental discipline in the late Enlightenment, a period which dedicated itself to the empirical study of man. Deductive reasoning, based on the universally applicable truths of reason (for example Christian Wolff's rationalistic philosophy which was so central to the early Enlightenment in Germany), was replaced by inductive thinking in which the relationship between "body" and "soul" was examined through self observation and the collection of case studies.
Thus, the last third of the 18th century saw the publication of numerous anthropological monographs – the first and most famous being Ernst Platner's Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (1772) – and periodicals – for example the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (1783-93, pub. Karl Phillip Moritz). Even the novelists of the period were interested in the study of the "whole man", and considered their literary work as a part of the anthropological project; Karl Phillip Moritz's Anton Reiser, Wieland's Agathon, Goethe's Werther and Schiller's Räuber can all be included here.
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